best christmas house decorations orange county

if i showed you this paint chip and askedyou to tell me what color it is, what would you say? how about this one? and this one? you probably said blue, purple, and brown— but if your native language is wobã© from cã´te d’ivoire, you probably would haveused one word for all three. that’s because not all languages have thesame number of basic color categories. in english, we have 11. russian has 12, but some languages, like wobã©,only have 3.

and researchers have found that if a languageonly has 3 or 4 basic colors, they can usually predict what those will be. so how do they do it? as you would expect, different languages havedifferent words for colors. but what interests researchers isn’t thosesimple translations, it’s the question of which colors get names at all. because as much as we think of colors in categories,the truth is that color is a spectrum. it’s not obvious why we should have a basiccolor term for this color, but not this one. and until the 1960s it was widely believedby anthropologists that cultures would just

chose from the spectrum randomly. but in 1969, two berkeley researchers, paulkay and brent berlin, published a book challenging that assumption. they had asked 20 people who spoke differentlanguages to look at these 330 color chips and categorize each of them by their basiccolor term. and they found hints of a universal pattern:if a language had six basic color words, they were always for black (or dark), white (orlight), red, green, yellow, and blue. if it had four terms, they were for black,white, red, and then either green or yellow. if it had only three, they were always forblack, white, and red.

it suggested that as languages develop, theycreate color names in a certain order. first black and white, then red, then greenand yellow, then blue, then others like brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. the theory was revolutionary. [music change] they weren’t the first researchers interestedin the question of how we name colors. in 1858, william gladstone — who would laterbecome a four-term british prime minister — published a book on the ancient greekworks of homer. he was struck by the fact that there weren’tmany colors at all in the text, and when there

were, homer would use the same word for “colourswhich, according to us, are essentially different.” he used the same word for purple to describe blood, a dark cloud, a wave, and a rainbow, and he referred to the sea as wine-looking. gladstone didn’t find any references toblue or orange at all. some researchers took this and other ancientwritings to wrongly speculate that earlier societies were colorblind. later in the 19th century, an anthropologistnamed w.h.r. rivers went on an expedition to papua newguinea, where he found that some tribes only had words for red, white and black, whileothers had additional words for blue and green.

"an expedition to investigate the cultures on a remote group of islands in the torres straits between australia and new guinea. his brief was to investigate the mental characteristics of the islanders. he claimed that the number of color termsin a population was related to their “intellectual and cultural development”. and used his findings to claim that papuanswere less physically evolved than europeans. berlin and kay didn’t make those racistclaims, but their color hierarchy attracted a lot of criticism. for one thing, critics pointed out that thestudy used a small sample size — 20 people,

all of whom were bilingual english speakers,not monolingual native speakers. and almost all the languages were from industrializedsocieties — hardly the best portrait of the entire world. but it also had to do with defining what a“basic color term” is. in the yele language in papua new guinea,for example, there are only basic color terms for black, white, and red. but there’s a broad vocabulary of everydayobjects — like the sky, ashes, and tree sap — that are used as color comparisonsthat cover almost all english color words. there are also languages like hanunã³â€™ofrom the phillippines, where a word can communicate

both color and physical feeling. they have four basic terms to describe color— but they’re on a spectrum of light vs. dark, strength vs. weakness, and wetness vs.dryness. those kinds of languages don’t fit neatlyinto a color chip identification test. but by the late 1970s, berlin and kay hada response for the critics. they called it the world color survey. they conducted the same labeling test on over2,600 native speakers of 110 unwritten languages from nonindustrialized societies. they found that with some tweaks, the colorhierarchy still checked out.

eighty-three percent of the languages fitinto the hierarchy. and when they averaged the centerpoint ofwhere each speaker labeled each of their language’s colors, they wound up with a sort of heatmap. those clusters matched pretty closely to theenglish speakers’ averages, which are labeled here. here’s how paul kay puts it:“it just turns out that most languages make cuts in the same place. some languages make fewer cuts than others.” so these color stages are widespread throughoutthe world… but why?

why would a word for red come before a wordfor blue? some have speculated that the stages correspondto the salience of the color in the natural environment. red is in blood and in dirt. blue, on the other hand, was fairly scarce before manufacturing. recently cognitive science researchers haveexplored this question by running computer simulations of how language evolves throughconversations between people. the simulations presented artificial agentswith multiple colors at a time, and, through a series of simple negotiations, those agentsdeveloped shared labels for the different

colors. and the order in which those labels emerged? first, reddish tones, then green and yellow,then blue, then orange. it matched the original stages pretty closely. and it suggests that there’s something aboutthe colors themselves that leads to this hierarchy. red is fundamentally more distinct than theother colors. so what does all this mean? why does it matter? well, it tells us that despite our many differencesacross cultures and societies ... there is

something universal about how humans try tomake sense of the world.

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: